Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 19, 1990 TAG: 9007190362
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The co-founder of the famed Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., died at Stormont-Vail Regional Medical Center in Topeka, where his cancer was diagnosed in June. He was 96.
The often outspoken, didactic doctor, once called the nation's "greatest living psychiatrist" by the American Psychiatric Association, had battled back from a brain tumor and a stroke to remain active as chairman of the board of his foundation.
His 15th book, "The Selected Correspondence of Karl A. Menninger: 1919-1945," was published in 1988.
A small-town boy who came home from Harvard to start what would eventually become a leading psychiatric center, "Dr. Karl" was equally at ease with Sigmund Freud, Albert Schweitzer, the wheat farmers of eastern Kansas and the mentally ill.
He trained thousands of psychiatrists (an estimated 5 percent of those practicing in America today), demystified psychoanalytic concepts in his popular books, and introduced innovative treatments in the farmhouse sanitarium that began with 12 beds in 1925 and grew 20-fold in subsequent decades.
Under his guidance, the sanitarium became an internationally known psychiatric center offering treatment, education, research and preventive programs for adults and children on a 310-acre campus with 1,050 employees and a $58 million annual budget.
He also founded a group of permanent homes for neglected and abandoned children, played a leading role in reforming his state's mental health and penal systems, and preached for more than half a century that mental disorders and criminal behavior are both preventable and treatable.
The Menninger Clinic, later called the Menninger Foundation, was the first psychoanalytic hospital in America, located in the unlikely Midwest locale of Topeka. At a time when mental treatment consisted largely of trying to relieve symptoms and provide humane care, Menninger was delving into his patients' early life experiences and their reactions to those events to explain what had gone wrong.
One of the most successful reformers in the history of American medicine, Menninger concentrated his efforts on the Kansas prison and mental hospital systems, but his writings sparked reform elsewhere, too. In "Man Against Himself" (1938), he examined the dark side of human nature, man's violent and destructive drive, and began formulating a philosophy for dealing with it. He found hope in the opposite instinct, explained in "Love Against Hate" in 1942.
In 1981 he became the first psychiatrist to be awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian decoration.
by CNB